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WF Comics
WF Comics is America's largest publisher of comic books. They publish most of the most famous characters in comic book history, including Titan, Minuteman, Nighthawk and Lioness. History The company was one of many publishers founded in the early 1930s, and enjoyed a boom period during the second World War as superhero comic books became extremely popular. WF Comics was one among many publishers, all of whom had their own stable of superheroes. In particular, Action Publishing had struck gold with the world's first superhero, Titan, in 1938. In his initial appearance, Titan wore a skin-tight outfit much akin to a circus strong-man, but artist Nick Mueller felt that this alone made for "boring" and "static" panels in which the hero was in flight. In the fifth issue, Mueller added Titan's now-iconic cape to make the character's movements seem more dramatic. Going up against a powerhouse like Action Publishing's Titan, WF Comics had struggled through the 1930s, with many of its books receiving lower circulation than their competitors. The company's fortunes changed with the United States' entrance into World War II. Minuteman The writer and artist team of Phil Moore and Jack Kirkman were brought together to collaborate on a project to help the war effort, which became the Minuteman. In their story, American scientists make a breakthrough that allows them to transform a 90-pound weakling of a soldier into the pinnacle of human perfection. The Minuteman donned a star-spangled costume to help with the war effort, personally knocking out Hitler dozens of times. Minuteman's popularity exploded, and WF Comics saw its circulation double almost overnight. Eager to ride on Minuteman's coattails, many other publishers granted WF Comics the rights to use their characters in the first-ever superhero crossovers. During World War II, Minuteman would team up with everyone from Titan to Nighthawk to Sea King and even Lioness. While interest in Minuteman's adventures faded with the end of World War II, his reign had been sufficient to make WF Comics the largest publisher of comic books in the world. During that time they purchased several smaller publishers, which gave them the rights to pulp heroes such as Stellar Comics' Richard Carter and crime fighters like Detective Stories' Nighthawk. These characters remained extremely popular after World War II, even after Minuteman's time in the limelight faded. Legal Woes In the late 1940s, comic book publishers began to consolidate their rights and trademarks after a landmark court decision in 1947 against Stately Comics over alleged copyright infringement on Legendary Comics' Lioness. Stately Comics had for some time published a character named Wonder Girl, who had received her powers while exploring an ancient Egyptian pyramid from the Egyptian goddess Isis. Since both Lioness and Wonder Girl drew their inspiration from Egyptian myth, Legendary Comics claimed that Stately Comics had infringed on a number of their storylines and villains. The courts agreed, and in 1947, Stately Comics was forced to pay a landmark settlement to Legendary which bankrupted the company. What followed was an era of comic book publishers muscling out many original creators of popular superheroes so that the publishers could protect themselves from similar settlements. From that point on, the comic book industry saw publishers bought and sold routinely as larger publishers sought to secure the rights to the largest stable of characters. By the early 1960s, only two large publishers of superhero comics remained: WF Comics and Legendary Comics. With rich and diverse casts of character, the big two ushered in a Silver Age of comics. First Legendary, and later WF Comics, began increasing the number of crossovers between their titles, slowly bringing their characters into a shared Legendary and a shared WF comic book universes, respectively. Worlds Collide Legendary Comics began to languish in the 1970s following the failed launch of several new titles intended to appeal to a younger audience. Prospects worsened when in 1973 owner Kevin Paulson was convicted of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company. In 1974, frustrated by what they saw as poor editorial decisions and gross mismanagement, several of Legendary's most prominent writers and artists left to work for WF Comics. Legendary had difficulty completing production on even their staple titles, and in 1975 partnered with WF Comics to release a massive crossover event, called Worlds Collide, in which characters from each company's respective universes did battle. While the event was well-received, it did little to slow Legendary Comics' demise. The company was still plagued by poor management and dwindling funds, and in 1977, WF Comics purchased the rights to all existing Legendary characters and titles. WF Comics were quick to capitalize on big-name characters like Titan and Lioness, bringing them into the WF Universe. Legendary characters were inserted with mixed reception into existing titles, and their own titles were rebooted from issue #1. Fans of Legendary characters found many of the new titles unhappy, and in spite of their windfall, WF Comics continued to see readership decline through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Post-Crisis Realignment In 1985, under the leadership of Alex Moore, son of Minuteman creator Phil Moore, WF Comics underwent a substantial reorganization of its characters to bring them "into alignment" in a massive crossover event called the Paradox Crisis. The Crisis was met with generally positive reception, and has since set the status-quo for the large WF Comics universe. Fictional Universe History WF Comics generally divides the timeline of its characters into pre-Crisis and post-Crisis Pre-Crisis Prior to the 1985 Paradox Crisis, characters in the WF Universe went essentially unchanged for decades at a time, often not even aging. Readers had become annoyed at multiple glaring continuity errors present as titles crossed over again and again. For instance, Nighthawk had teamed up with Frank Carter no less than six times, but in a 1970 issue of the Terrific Trio, the superpowered descendants of Frank Carter and Luna the Queen of the Moon, Nighthawk acted as if he had no knowledge of Frank Carter. In another telling example, in 1974 the speedster Red Dash traveled back in time to meet his father, who had been a soldier during World War II. This was in spite of the fact that Red Dash had in fact appeared for the first time in 1944 as an ally of Minuteman and had personally fought in World War II. These continuity errors only worsened after WF Comics acquired Legendary Comics' cast of characters, who had just 3 years before appeared alongside WF Characters. But when they were re-introduced into the universe, it created many glaring continuity errors. Titan, who had for decades protected the city of New York, was suddenly the great hero of the main city of the WF Universe, Zenith. The Paradox Crisis The famed detective Nighthawk discovered the numerous continuity errors while investigating the death of the Sea Prince, son of the Sea King. Throughout the Sea King's publication history, he had sired no less than four sons, three of whom had existed for only a single issue each, and then were never mentioned again. Nighthawk discovered the births of each of the previous Sea Princes and confronted Sea King with the information, who seemed shocked that he had fathered sons who he had lost all memory of, and who had all simply vanished without a trace. Sea King and Nighthawk joined forces to scour the world for Sea King's missing sons, and in the process found the first Sea Prince alive and in a mental hospital in Center City, far from any ocean. The first Sea Prince, whose name in the hospital was just the number "214", told his father and Nighthawk that he had been literally pulled out of time by some malevolent force, and only managed to escape back into the world twenty years ago. 214 further claimed that this force had been preying upon the world's heroes, altering the flow of time into an eternal paradox, where they never aged. But because they never aged, time never moved forward, and they were trapped in the same endless conflict against the same villains who continues to return again and again. Sea King and Nighthawk joined with 214 to try to find the villain behind the paradox, but a rift tore open to reveal the hero Minuteman, unseen for almost thirty years. The bewildered hero mistook the trio for Nazi supersoldiers. They managed to subdue Minuteman, and 214 was able to confirm that he too had been torn from time. By this time, rifts were beginning to open all over the world, and the villain finally made himself known. The Egyptian god Set, a longtime enemy of Lioness who had been thought destroyed during the Worlds Collide event revealed that ever since Lioness had released him from his prison in 1942, he had been feeding off of the entropy of the world. As entropy is what gives time a direction, without it, the world was, in a sense, "lost to time". It was what allowed him to do battle with Lioness again and again and emerge each time from a seemingly certain death. Now that the planets were in alignment, he would be able to form a bridge of chaos between the Earth and Titan's homeworld of Xenon, which as a result of all of the rifts in the universe had reappeared from its apparent destruction. All the heroes of the WF Universe united to try to stop Set, who in turn had called upon all the villains of the WF Universe to aid in one giant final battle to allow Set to create the bridge of chaos. In the end, the heroes, led by Titan, were victorious, and managed to use Set's Paradox against him, trapping him in the moment after his release from the pyramid and releasing the entropy he had stolen from the Earth. Post-Crisis The resulting release of entropy allowed time to finally move forward for the heroes again, and they found themselves catapulted forward in time. The universe had now aged from the original publication of Titan #1 in 1938 to present time as if in real-time. The choice of having Titan be the world's first superhero also meant that all the heroes in the WF Universe were in one way or another tied to Titan's arrival from his homeworld of Xenon. This had numerous implications for the WF Universe's heroes: *Minuteman was the United State's attempt at duplicating Titan's powers in an Earthling. He was not nearly as powerful as Titan, but a success in many other ways. After his final mission at the end of World War II, Minuteman was lost in the North Atlantic and frozen in ice, where he remained until he was discovered in present day and revived. *Lioness still claimed to be the Egyptian goddess Sakhet, but she had become considerably more cat-like in the Post-Crisis universe. It has been heavily implied that she was the result of a failed attempt to recreate the super-soldier program that had created Minuteman. The various solar powers she manifested over the years have since been revealed to be part of a network of orbital lasers that she can control through a supercomputer in the red solar disk Aten she wears around her neck. *The original Nighthawk who first prowled the rooftops in 1939 had long-since retired, and was now in his late 70s. The mantle of Nighthawk had been passed down to his sidekick Bluebird, which had become a master/apprentice relationship, with Nighthawk choosing a Bluebird who he would train to become his eventual successor. *Sea King and the people of Atlantis are descendants of ancient Xenonian visitors who had traveled to Earth during ancient times. This makes Atlanteans "half-Xenonians", which accounts for their tremendous strength and durability. Sea King himself is the same hero who fought with the allies in World War II, but while he aged more slowly than normal humans, he has still grown weaker over the years. He currently rules Atlantis on a full-time basis, and leaves the day-to-day work of superheroing to his son, Sea Prince. *The original Blue Spider was still an active superhero immediately Post-Crisis, but within two years it was revealed that his son had begun manifesting the same powers he had developed after being bitten by a spider dosed with Xenonite radiation. Since then, his son had become the new Blue Spider, with his younger daughter manifesting similar powers and beginning to fight alongside him as the Gold Spider. *Frank Carter was an explorer who found one of the first ring gates that formed a tenuous connection between the Earth and Xenon, and had fathered the Terrific Trio with a Xenonian princess, making the Trio half-Xenonian. Post-Crisis, the Trio had also retired, with the Fantastic Man spending most of his time in the lab. He finally settled down with his sweetheart, Ghost Gal, and they had three children, who would team up with the children of the other members of the Terrific Trio to form the current Fantastic Five. *Titan himself, as a Xenonian exposed to Earth's yellow sun, had stopped aging when he reached the peak of his powers, explaining why he remains healthy and so young compared to his contemporaries. He does admit, however, that he has needed to take multiple secret identities through his lifetime to avoid drawing suspicion from his friends and neighbors.